With the establishment of Roman rule by Emperor Augustus in 30 B.C., more than six centuries of Roman and Byzantine control began. Egypt again became the province of an empire, as it had been under the Persians and briefly under Alexander. As the principal source of the grain supply for Rome, it came under the direct control of the emperor in his capacity as supreme military chief, and a strong force was garrisoned there. Gradually, Latin replaced Greek as the language of higher administration. In 212 Rome gave the Egyptians citizenship in the empire.

The emperor ruled as successor to the Ptolemies with the title of "Pharaoh, Lord of the Two Lands," and the conventional divine attributes assigned to Egyptian kings were attributed to him. Rome was careful, however, to bring the native priesthood under its control, although guaranteeing traditional priestly rights and privileges.

Augustus and his successors continued the tradition of building temples to the local gods on which the rulers and the gods were depicted in the Egyptian manner. The Romans completed the construction of an architectural jewel, the Temple of Isis on Philae Island (Jazirat Filah), which was begun under the Ptolemies. A new artistic development during this period was the painting of portraits on wood, an art that originated in the Fayyum region. These portraits were placed on the coffins of mummies.

The general pattern of Roman Egypt included a strong, centralized administration supported by a military force large enough to guarantee internal order and to provide security against marauding nomads. There was an elaborate bureaucracy with an extended system of registers and controls, and a social hierarchy based on caste and privilege with preferred treatment for the Hellenized population of the towns over the rural and native Egyptian population. The best land continued to form the royal domain.

The empire that Rome established was wider, more enduring, and better administered than any the Mediterranean world had known. For centuries, it provided an ease of communication and a unity of culture throughout the empire that would not be seen again until modern times. In Western Europe, Rome founded a tradition of public order and municipal government that outlasted the empire itself. In the East, however, where Rome came into contact with older and more advanced civilizations, Roman rule was less successful.

The story of Roman Egypt is a sad record of shortsighted exploitation leading to economic and social decline. Like the Ptolemies, Rome treated Egypt as a mere estate to be exploited for the benefit of the rulers. But however incompetently some of the later Ptolemies managed their estate, much of the wealth they derived from it remained in the country itself. Rome, however, was an absentee landlord, and a large part of the grain delivered as rent by the royal tenants or as tax by the landowners as well as the numerous money-taxes were sent to Rome and represented a complete loss to Egypt.

The history of Egypt in this period cannot be separated from the history of the Roman Empire. Thus, Egypt was affected by the spread of Christianity in the empire in the first century A.D. and by the decline of the empire during the third century A.D. Christianity arrived early in Egypt, and the new religion quickly spread from Alexandria into the hinterland, reaching Upper Egypt by the second century. According to some Christian traditions, St. Mark brought Christianity to Egypt in A.D. 37, and the church in Alexandria was founded in A.D. 40. The Egyptian Christians are called Copts, a word derived from the Greek word for the country, Aegyptos. In the Coptic language, the Copts also called themselves "people of Egypt." Thus the word Copt originally implied nationality rather than religion.

In the third century A.D., the decay of the empire gradually affected the Roman administration of Egypt. Roman bureaucracy became overcentralized and poorly managed. The number of qualified applicants for administrative positions was seriously reduced by Roman civil war, pestilence, and conflict among claimants to imperial power.

A renaissance of imperial authority and effectiveness took place under Emperor Diocletian. During his reign (284-305), the partition of the Roman Empire into eastern and western segments began. Diocletian inaugurated drastic political and fiscal reforms and sought to simplify imperial administration. Under Diocletian, the administrative unity of Egypt was destroyed by transforming Egypt from one province into three. Seeing Christianity as a threat to Roman state religion and thus to the unity of the empire, Diocletian launched a violent persecution of Christians.

The Egyptian church was particularly affected by the Roman persecutions, beginning with Septimius Severus's edict of 202 dissolving the influential Christian School of Alexandria and forbidding future conversions to Christianity. In 303 Emperor Diocletian issued a decree ordering all churches demolished, all sacred books burned, and all Christians who were not officials made slaves. The decree was carried out for three years, a period known as the "Era of Martyrs." The lives of many Egyptian Christians were spared only because more workers were needed in the porphyry quarries and emerald mines that were worked by Egyptian Christians as "convict labor."

Emperor Constantine I (324-337) ruled both the eastern and western parts of the empire. In 330 he established his capital at Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). Egypt was governed from Constantinople as part of the Byzantine Empire. In 312 Constantine established Christianity as the official religion of the empire, and his Edict of Milan of 313 established freedom of worship.

By the middle of the fourth century, Egypt was largely a Christian country. In 324 the ecumenical Council of Nicea established the patriarchate of Alexandria as second only to that of Rome; its jurisdiction extended over Egypt and Libya. The patriarchate had a profound influence on the early development of the Christian church because it helped to clarify belief and to formulate dogmas. In 333 the number of Egyptian bishops was estimated at nearly 100.

After the fall of Rome, the Byzantine Empire became the center of both political and religious power. The political and religious conflict between the Copts of Egypt and the rulers of Byzantium began when the patriarchate of Constantinople began to rival that of Alexandria. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 initiated the great schism that separated the Egyptian Church from Catholic Christendom. The schism had momentous consequences for the future of Christianity in the East and for Byzantine power. Ostensibly, the council was called to decide on the nature of Christ. If Christ were both God and man, had he two natures? The Arians had already been declared heretics for denying or minimizing the divinity of Christ; the opposite was to ignore or minimize his humanity. Coptic Christians were Monophysites who believed that after the incarnation Christ had but one nature with dual aspects. The council, however, declared that Christ had two natures and that he was equally human and equally divine. The Coptic Church refused to accept the council's decree and rejected the bishop sent to Egypt. Henceforth, the Coptic Church was in schism from the Catholic Church as represented by the Byzantine Empire and the Byzantine Church.

For nearly two centuries, Monophysitism in Egypt became the symbol of national and religious resistance to Byzantium's political and religious authority. The Egyptian Church was severely persecuted by Byzantium. Churches were closed, and Coptic Christians were killed, tortured, and exiled in an effort to force the Egyptian Church to accept Byzantine orthodoxy. The Coptic Church continued to appoint its own patriarchs, refusing to accept those chosen by Constantinople and attempting to depose them. The break with Catholicism in the fifth century converted the Coptic Church to a national church with deeply rooted traditions that have remained unchanged to this day.

By the seventh century, the religious persecutions and the growing pressure of taxation had engendered great hatred of the Byzantines. As a result, the Egyptians offered little resistance to the conquering armies of Islam.

A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.

A firestorm is created as a result of the stack effect as the heat of the original fire draws in more and more of the surrounding air. This draft can be quickly increased if a low level jet stream exists over or near the fire. As the updraft mushrooms, strong gusty winds develop around the fire, directed inward which supply the fire with additional air. This would seem to prevent the firestorm from spreading on the wind, but the tremendous turbulence also created causes the strong surface inflow winds to change direction erratically. This wind shear is capable of producing small tornado- or dust devil-like circulations called fire whirls which can also dart around erratically, damage or destroy houses and buildings, and quickly spread the fire to areas outside the central area of the fire. A firestorm may also develop into a mesocyclone and induce true tornadoes.[1]

The greater draft of a firestorm draws in greater quantities of oxygen, which significantly increases combustion, thereby also substantially increasing the production of heat. The intense heat of a firestorm manifests largely as radiated heat (infrared radiation) which ignites flammable material at a distance ahead of the fire itself. This also serves to expand the area and the intensity of the firestorm. Violent, erratic wind drafts suck movables into the fire, while people and animals caught close or under the fire die for lack of available oxygen. Radiated heat from the fire can melt asphalt, metal, and glass, and turn street tarmac into flammable hot liquid. The very high temperatures replicate the conditions of a smelting furnace, where anything that might possibly burn does so readily, until the firestorm runs out of fuel.--wiki

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

This website argues that the fourth kingdom in Nebuchadnezzar's dream [Daniel 2] is not Rome but the Ottoman Empire. This is the empire the Lord will smash [the stone cut without hands] when he returns.

Zech 14: 1 The day of the LORD is coming when your plunder will be divided among you.

2 I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the city.

3 Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle.

7 And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.

8 The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

--Rev 17

At the end of the war, the Allies occupied İstanbul and the Ottoman government collapsed. The Treaty of Sèvres, a plan designed by the Allies to dismember the remaining Ottoman territories, was signed on August 10, 1920, though never ratified by the Sultan.

The Lausanne Treaty formally acknowledged the new League of Nations mandates in the Middle East, the cession of their territories on the Arabian Peninsula, and British sovereignty over Cyprus. The League of Nations granted Class A mandates for the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon and British Mandate of Mesopotamia and Palestine, the later comprising two autonomous regions: Mandate Palestine and Transjordan). Parts of the Ottoman Empire on the Arabian Peninsula became part of what is today Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire became a pivotal milestone in the creation of the modern Middle East, the result of which bore witness to the creation of new conflicts and hostilities in the region.--Wikipedia

10 And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.

11 And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition

--Rev 17

Five are fallen--Egyptian, Assyria, Babylonian, Persian, Greece

One is, the sixth--Roman

The other is not yet come, the seventh--Ottoman

This one is the beast that was [the seventh], and is not, and is the eighth--Ottoman

Revelation 6:8And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

"pale"

G5515χλωρόςchlōroskhlo-ros'From the same as G5514; greenish, that is, verdant, dun-colored: - green, pale.

There is just something about the spirit relating to Rapture doctrine that reminds me of a horror movie. Its adherents seem to be obsessed with evil. The words over and over are of terror and torment, Satanic influences, wickedness and evil events. This world is not the devil's world. It has never belonged to him and it never will. The saints are going to take over, not the wicked. The saints are going to stay. The wicked will be removed. I have a strong desire that you would read Bill Britton's booklet, "A Closer Look at the Rapture." http://www.dimensionsoftruth.org/bill-britton/closer-look-at-rapture/

« Last Edit: July 14, 2012, 08:41:02 AM by reFORMer »

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I went to church; but, the Church wasn't on the program! JESUS WANTS HIS BODY BACK!! MEET WITHOUT HUMAN HEADSHIP!!!

And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters' clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay.

42 And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.

43 And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

"What is happening in Syria is that [President] Bashar Assad and his Alawite elite are fighting a war of self-survival, self-preservation against what is essentially a Sunni revolt against them," Dore Gold, director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, told CBN News.

This revolt pits Sunni against Shiite.

"The strategic fault line of conflict in the region [is] between the Iran-led regional block on the one hand and, I would say, the Sunni block -- the Sunni group of states, including Saudi Arabia," Gold said.

Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, told CBN News "that fault line right now is running through Syria."

The line splits the Middle East into two large Islamic camps. The larger one includes the Sunni nations of Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf States -- and the epicenter of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia.

Iran leads the Shiite Islam group, which includes its proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon and Syria.

While Assad and much of his regime technically belong to a sect called Alawite, they align themselves with Shiite Islam.

So with both groups calling themselves Muslims, why do they fight each other? The answer goes back to the beginning of Islam.

"The Shiites believe that Islam should have been led from the very beginning by a caliph who came from the family of the prophet himself, in fact from the family of the cousin of the prophet called Ali," Hebrew University Prof. Moshe Sharon, a world-renowned expert on Islam, explained.

"The Sunnis believe that the caliph, namely the leader of the Islamic community, the 'Commander of the Faithful,' should be elected from the community," he said.

This theological disagreement led to the great Islamic divide.

"Of course [it] developed during the years and there was tremendous enmity and tremendous hatred between the two parts," Sharon said.

That hatred is now being fought on Syrian soil.

"It's a very dramatic development, and it's a reflection of this main struggle in the Middle East today," Gold explained.

In this struggle Iran funds and arms the Assad regime, while the Saudis and other Sunni powers back the opposition, which includes elements of the Muslim Brotherhood. The United States is lining up behind the opposition groups.

"There's growing evidence that on the ground and away from the public eye there are American personnel who are helping to direct resources and weaponry to the rebels," Spyer said.

Spyer said the United States and the West have, in effect, given the job of building up the Syrian opposition to the Saudis. Unfortunately, that opposition is becoming more radical and Islamist.

"To put it simply, if you give the Saudis the job of creating an insurgency for you, well don't be surprised if you get a Sunni Islamist insurgency," Spyer said.

The outcome of this struggle between these two Middle East titans will greatly determine the future and fate of the Middle East. It's a conflict Israeli leaders are watching closely.

If the Syrian opposition topples Assad, it's possible Israel could have a second radical Islamic regime on its borders.

29 Oh, Ariel, Ariel, town where David encamped!Year by year, let the festivals come around—2 but I will oppress Ariel.There will be mourning and lamentation; she will be like an Ariel to me.3 I will surround you like a wall, and I will lay a siege against you with assault towers, and I will raise up siegeworks against you.

4 You will be brought down; from the ground you will speak; from low in the dust your speech will come.Your voice will be like a ghost's from the earth; from the dust your words will whisper.

5 But your many enemies will be like fine dust, the terrible horde like passing chaff.Suddenly, in an instant, 6 the Lord of heavenly forces will come to you with thunder, earthquake, and a mighty voice, with whirlwind, tempest, and flames of devouring fire.

7 The horde of nations fighting against Ariel, and all who make war on her and her fortress and besiege her, will be like a dream, a vision of the night.8 It will be like when a hungry person dreams of eating but wakes up and the mouth is empty. Or when a thirsty person dreams of drinking but wakes up and has a dry throat.So will it be for all the horde of nations who fight against Mount Zion.

9 Be shocked and stunned; blind yourselves; be blind!Be drunk, but not on wine; stagger, but not on account of beer!10 The Lord has poured on you a spirit of deep sleep, and has shut your eyes, you prophets, and covered your heads, you seers.

11 This entire vision has become for you like the words of a sealed scroll. When they give it to one who can read, saying, "Read this," that one will say, "I can't, because it's sealed." 12 And when the scroll is given to one who can't read, saying, "Read this," that one will say, "I can't read."

Daniel 11:23 After coming to an agreement with him, he will act deceitfully, and with only a few people he will rise to power.

When the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and will achieve what neither his fathers nor his forefathers did. He will distribute plunder, loot, and wealth among his followers. He will plot the overthrow of fortresses--but only for a time.--Dan 11:24

Nehemiah 9:25 They captured fortified cities and fertile land; they took possession of houses filled with all kinds of good things, wells already dug, vineyards, olive groves and fruit trees in abundance. They ate to the full and were well-nourished; they reveled in your great goodness.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - 17:25 What Is the Difference Between Sunni and Shiite Muslims--and Why Does It Matter? HNN Staff

The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.

The Sunni branch believes that the first four caliphs--Mohammed's successors--rightfully took his place as the leaders of Muslims. They recognize the heirs of the four caliphs as legitimate religious leaders. These heirs ruled continuously in the Arab world until the break-up of the Ottoman Empire following the end of the First World War.

Shiites, in contrast, believe that only the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, are the legitimate successors of Mohammed. In 931 the Twelfth Imam disappeared. This was a seminal event in the history of Shiite Muslims. According to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame,"Shiite Muslims, who are concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, [believe they] had suffered the loss of divinely guided political leadership" at the time of the Imam's disappearance. Not"until the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1978" did they believe that they had once again begun to live under the authority of a legitimate religious figure.

Another difference between Sunnis and Shiites has to do with the Mahdi, "the rightly-guided one" whose role is to bring a just global caliphate into being. As historian Timothy Furnish has written,"The major difference is that for Shi`is he has already been here, and will return from hiding; for Sunnis he has yet to emerge into history: a comeback v. a coming out, if you will."

In a special 9-11 edition of the Journal of American History, Appleby explained that the Shiite outlook is far different from the Sunni's, a difference that is highly significant:

... for Sunni Muslims, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim world, the loss of the caliphate after World War I was devastating in light of the hitherto continuous historic presence of the caliph, the guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. Sunni fundamentalist leaders thereafter emerged in nations such as Egypt and India, where contact with Western political structures provided them with a model awkwardly to imitate ... as they struggled after 1924 to provide a viable alternative to the caliphate.

In 1928, four years after the abolishment of the caliphate, the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Al-Banna was appalled by"the wave of atheism and lewdness [that] engulfed Egypt" following World War I. The victorious Europeans had"imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices." Suddenly the very heart of the Islamic world was penetrated by European"schools and scientific and cultural institutes" that" cast doubt and heresy into the souls of its sons and taught them how to demean themselves, disparage their religion and their fatherland, divest themselves of their traditions and beliefs, and to regard as sacred anything Western."14 Most distressing to al-Banna and his followers was what they saw as the rapid moral decline of the religious establishment, including the leading sheikhs, or religious scholars, at Al-Azhar, the grand mosque and center of Islamic learning in Cairo. The clerical leaders had become compromised and corrupted by their alliance with the indigenous ruling elites who had succeeded the European colonial masters.

Osama bin Laden is a Sunni Muslim. To him the end of the reign of the caliphs in the 1920s was catastrophic, as he made clear in a videotape made after 9-11. On the tape, broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 7, 2001, he proclaimed:"What America is tasting now is only a copy of what we have tasted. ... Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more [than] eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated."

Juan Cole, a well-known historian of the Middle East, has pointed out on his blog, Informed Comment, that the split between Sunni and Shiites in Iraq is of relatively recent origin:

I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 year s. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

In December 2006 the New York Times reported that it is not just ordinary Americans who find it difficult to remember the difference between Sunnis and Shiites:

Silvestre Reyes, the Democratic nominee to head the House Intelligence Committee, failed to answer both questions correctly last week when put to the test by Congressional Quarterly. He mislabeled Al Qaeda as predominantly Shiite, and on Hezbollah, which is mostly Shiite, he drew a blank.

"Speaking only for myself," he told reporters, "it's hard to keep things in perspective and in the categories."

Not that he's alone. Other members of Congress from both parties have also flunked on-the-spot inquiries. Indeed, some of the smartest Western statesmen of the last century have found themselves flummoxed by Islam. Winston Churchill — in 1921, while busy drawing razor-straight borders across a mercurial Middle East — asked an aide for a three-line note explaining the "religious character" of the Hashemite leader he planned to install in Baghdad.

"Is he a Sunni with Shaih sympathies or a Shaih with Sunni sympathies?" Mr. Churchill wrote, using an antiquated spelling. ("I always get mixed up between these two," he added.)

And maybe religious memorization should not be required for policymaking. Gen. William Odom, who directed the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, said that Mr. Reyes mainly needs to know "how the intelligence community works."

Yet, improving American intelligence, according to General Odom and others with close ties to the Middle East and the American intelligence community, requires more than just a organization chart.

A cheat sheet is in order.

The Review asked nearly a dozen experts, from William R. Polk, author of "Understanding Iraq," to Paul R. Pillar, the C.I.A. official who coordinated intelligence on the Middle East until he retired last year, to explain the region. Here, a quick distillation.

What caused the original divide?

The groups first diverged after the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, and his followers could not agree on whether to choose bloodline successors or leaders most likely to follow the tenets of the faith.

The group now known as Sunnis chose Abu Bakr, the prophet's adviser, to become the first successor, or caliph, to lead the Muslim state. Shiites favored Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law. Ali and his successors are called imams, who not only lead the Shiites but are considered to be descendants of Muhammad. After the 11th imam died in 874, and his young son was said to have disappeared from the funeral, Shiites in particular came to see the child as a Messiah who had been hidden from the public by God.

The largest sect of Shiites, known as "twelvers," have been preparing for his return ever since.

How did the violence start?

In 656, Ali's supporters killed the third caliph. Soon after, the Sunnis killed Ali's son Husain.

Fighting continued but Sunnis emerged victorious over the Shiites and came to revere the caliphate for its strength and piety.

Shiites focused on developing their religious beliefs, through their imams.

Could America become "Islamized" by 2016 with the immigration of 100 million Muslims? How and why could this happen? Could immigration policies be put into effect that would prevent this from happening?

"..the US is solidly behind the rise to power of the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria." Why this is dangerous to the Christians in the middle east, to Israel, the US, and the Christian West. How it will lead to massive Moslem immigration to the US.

Turkey, the final seat of the Islamic Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, is Sunni. Saudi Arabia is Sunni. Syria and Iran are currently Shi'a. Sunni rebels are fighting against the Shi'a government in Syria.Sunni Moslem brotherhood has now taken over the countries of Egypt, Libya, and is in the process of trying to topple the Shi'a government of Syria. The US gov't is standing behind them. Why is the US gov't supporting Sunni over Shi'a?

"we are no longer a Christian Nation"--Barack Hussein Soetoro-O'bama

"if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."--BHS-O

.......website argues that the fourth kingdom in Nebuchadnezzar's dream [Daniel 2] is not Rome but the Ottoman Empire. This is the empire the Lord will smash [the stone cut without hands] when he returns.

The 4 world empires in the statue with the head of God culminated with the Roman Empire which was when, " a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet." Then the entire image was, "...broken in pieces together...that became like the chaff." It was blown away with no place found for them. What has been happening for the last 2 thousand years and is prophesied to continue until fulfilled is, "The stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth." (Dn 235)

The 4 beasts of Daniel are Great Brittain, Russia, Germany and the United Nations. The prophetic teachings of the 1800's had them as reiterations of the statue's 4 world empires. An examination of the Word concerning the placement in these empires of the scattering of Israel after the feet and a parallel place for the gathering of Israel after the birth of the 4th beast reveals this 4th beast, the U.N., to have been born after the defeat of the 3rd "panzer" beast with Hitler's death in 1945 and before the formation of Israel in 1948.

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I went to church; but, the Church wasn't on the program! JESUS WANTS HIS BODY BACK!! MEET WITHOUT HUMAN HEADSHIP!!!

The Roman Empire [pagan] morphed into the Byzantine Empire [Christian] which morphed into the Ottoman Empire [Muslim]. The Ottoman Empire is rising again today [after being fatally wounded in WWI].

So we could see a direct 1 to 1 correlation between Roman and Ottoman. All of the middle east was Christian after Christ--from Turkey to northern Africa and into Asia--from the time of Constantine to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

The stone is not breaking other kingdoms yet--quite the opposite. This is still a prophecy yet to happen with the return of Christ.

The stone is not breaking other kingdoms yet--quite the opposite. This is still a prophecy yet to happen with the return of Christ.

How can you say that after you just described the following, the disapation of the Roman Empire by Christ, the Stone cut out without hands. The pieces of the empire were blown away by the Spirit of God. He changed it from within.

The Roman Empire [pagan] morphed into the Byzantine Empire [Christian] which morphed into the Ottoman Empire [Muslim].

All of the middle east was Christian after Christ--from Turkey to northern Africa and into Asia--from the time of Constantine to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Though evidence is there was an early incursion of Christ into China, it has been observed that the whole world was at one point Christian, except for China which would have become Christian if the Mass could have been said in Chinese.

The stone is not breaking other kingdoms yet--quite the opposite. This is still a prophecy yet to happen with the return of Christ.

You just described how Christ is in us usurped the kingdoms. "We are members of His body; of His flesh and of His bones." (Ephesians530) The reign of His kingdom has seen some setbacks in the half a Milennia of years coming into our present. Much that has been Christian in the West seems asleep in apostasy; yet, millions in South America, Africa and parts of Asia have been powerfully transformed by the outpouring of God's fire in the last several decades. It is a more spiritual reign than in the times of the Roman and Orthodox ascendency. The mountain is still in the process of filling all the earth and it seems possible that a tipping point, an entrance into the Age of Tabernacles, could come quickly with a confrontation of the Beast, the kings of the earth and their armies gathered to war against "the Word of God" (Revelation 1913) and His army.

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I went to church; but, the Church wasn't on the program! JESUS WANTS HIS BODY BACK!! MEET WITHOUT HUMAN HEADSHIP!!!

You've pointed out again (in reply #22) what I've just said and will repeat with some differences. We are in period of loss of ground in a more institutional, worldly and carnal kingdom; but, there are millions being swept into the kingdom of God in several parts of the globe. This "revival," if you want to call it that, is not retreating. It is going to become a vast hurricane of fire. The kingdom of God is coming into rule with a much more spiritual source than that from, say, 500 AD -- 1500 AD.

And, an entrance into the Age of Tabernacles, could come quickly with a confrontation of the Beast, the kings of the earth and their armies gathered to war against "the Word of God" (Revelation 1913) and His army. It is very possible that the Muslim Mahdi could be the Beast. "The Word of God" could be seen as the many-membered body of Christ (1 Corinthians 1212.) Rapture doctrine people would probably say this "Word" is Messiah Jesus, in the guise of the limited flesh of His first coming before He died and rose again. At any rate, Mahdi vs. Messiah!? We'll have to wait and see.

« Last Edit: July 23, 2012, 07:16:59 AM by reFORMer »

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I went to church; but, the Church wasn't on the program! JESUS WANTS HIS BODY BACK!! MEET WITHOUT HUMAN HEADSHIP!!!

We are in period of loss of ground in a more institutional, worldly and carnal kingdom; but, there are millions being swept into the kingdom of God in several parts of the globe

I am watching the disintegration of Christianity in my own country and it's small consolation to me what revivals might be going on in Africa or China.

In a similar fashion, Israel is facing a rising Sunni caliphate in the Middle East and they are finding themselves needing more than ever a Christian America to lean on which is no longer there.

As I turn these things over in my mind, I know what Nazism is, I know what it means to be a minority ruled by Islam--the two systems are very similar to each other and natural allies--and we see them acting as natural allies on the world stage today, instead of on a national stage. What played out in Germany under Hitler and in the Middle East under Islamic fundamentalism is shaping up to play out over nations instead of within them, because there is no other way Satan can bring in his NWO.

And, Israel and Christian America are two of the biggest impediments to Satan so both must go.

Not to be gloomy or anything [ok maybe I am gloomy tonight], but Jesus said it himself--

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. Mat 24:21